Going electric

[ehk089]

Looking for some input on a controller. I’m currently in a keggle and cooler setup and am having problems hitting temps and would like the ability to step mash so I’m working on an electric herms 3 vessel. I want to be able to support 2 5500w uld elements ala electric brewery website. It looks like the most cost effective option (cheaper than diy even) is the Hosehead by brewtronix. I’m considering buying it, but just wondered if anyone has a more cost effective method, or good/bad things to say about the Hosehead. I also really like that it can be remotely accessed, so if I filled strike water the night before, I could start hearing from my bed in the am!

 

[dmwahl]

Looking for some input on a controller. I’m currently in a keggle and cooler setup and am having problems hitting temps and would like the ability to step mash so I’m working on an electric herms 3 vessel. I want to be able to support 2 5500w uld elements ala electric brewery website. It looks like the most cost effective option (cheaper than diy even) is the Hosehead by brewtronix. I’m considering buying it, but just wondered if anyone has a more cost effective method, or good/bad things to say about the Hosehead. I also really like that it can be remotely accessed, so if I filled strike water the night before, I could start hearing from my bed in the am!

I definitely didn't spend half that much on my single 5500W controller with an Auber EZBoil, so a double 5500W system should easily be less if you build it yourself. 485 seems fairly reasonable though given you don't have to do any of the work yourself. I would personally never leave a Raspberry Pi in charge of 11kw unsupervised though, at least not without some fail-safes in place.

 

[Jrnose2]

Thing is amazing! Been using it since the original kickstarter of it!

 

[timpritchard23]

Looking for some input on a controller. I’m currently in a keggle and cooler setup and am having problems hitting temps and would like the ability to step mash so I’m working on an electric herms 3 vessel. I want to be able to support 2 5500w uld elements ala electric brewery website. It looks like the most cost effective option (cheaper than diy even) is the Hosehead by brewtronix. I’m considering buying it, but just wondered if anyone has a more cost effective method, or good/bad things to say about the Hosehead. I also really like that it can be remotely accessed, so if I filled strike water the night before, I could start hearing from my bed in the am!

I've got a hosehead and used for about 10 brews now. I put craftbeerpi on it and it's incredibly flexible. Runs both my 5500w elements with ease on my 50A outlet. Can set it up to run a bunch of different ways and even hooked it up to run a fermentation on my conical in a pinch. Remote access is awesome. No problems at all with it yet. Highly recommend it.

 

[augiedoggy]

Brucontrol with an arduino based controller is also a cost effective way to go with some nice advantages over other controllers or software like being able to write custom scripts to automate things like fermentation schedules... it also works with any type of temp probe. and it runs on any modern windows pc

 

[golfindia]

I made a clone of the hosehead controller. It was cost effective because I already had a 30amp manual control box, I just used everything I had and added a Pi board and a few small relays. I use the strange brew software, has worked great for a year and a half.